Every business wants to increase sales volumes. To achieve that businesses need to not only actively look for new customers but to retain the existing customers.
That means bringing the two teams together to develop common metrics, definitions, share goals, and all lead generation strategies Aligning your sales and marketing strategies around a single revenue cycle will increase sales productivity and thus improve ROI.
Here are some of the ways your CRM software can help you improve your organizational marketing and sales strategy:
- Improved inter-departmental communication
According to a report by Workfront’s Marketing State of Work Report, marketers are highly distracted by excessive emails and wasteful meetings. The report further revealed that miscommunication was the biggest cause of conflicts among different departments in the workplace. How does a CRM software make it easy? It offers a good shared-work platform that increases the efficiency of the sales and marketing teams. Besides, your CRM software will help you keep all your marketing records, the most effective outreach tactics, the document opens and your marketing reports.
- CRM software offers much deeper insights
You need to evaluate your marketing and sales strategies every once in a while. CRM software offers shared access to all of the lead contact information to both sales and marketing teams. Besides, you can always populate the lead contact profile with added information. That way, any information that is useful to both teams such as the company background, interaction with the brand or their competitors can be easily accessed.
- Allows collaboration between the two teams
For a successful sales and marketing campaign, the teams need to share their goals and expectations. That means the team must collaborate to define the lead management strategies to adopt – that is, lead generation, nurturing and scoring strategies. So instead of working on different goals, successful organizations create bridges that allow the team to work together to generate ideas, expectations, cuts costs and reduce bottlenecks.
- Avoid duplicating efforts
Duplicated efforts lead to lost time and resources which could have been put to better use in the organization. Thanks to the automation benefits of a CRM software, your marketing and sales team will be able to see where each prospect and lead stand in the buyers’ journey. That way, it becomes easy for them to come up targeted content that suits a particular segment along the sales pipeline. Your CRM software will help increase leads to sales conversion rates. That way, your marketing tea, will be able to create targeted messaging while your sales team will be able to focus on outreach of marketing qualified leads.
According to Marketo, most of the organizations “spend 30-40% of their revenue on sales and marketing.” That means if the two departments coordinate and align themselves, they can optimize the companies expenditure for increased productivity.
- Nurture leads and improve lead quality
Once the marketing team acquires a lead, it must be taken through additional screening steps before it’s taken to a sales team. The truth is, about 70% of marketing leads never graduate to sales. There are times when marketing team send poorly vetted, assessed, nurtured lead to the sales team. To avoid that frustrating scenario, you need to connect your marketing automation software to your CRM software so that the leads can be vetted, assessed, nurtured and segmented before moving to the sales stage.
It’s all about your customer. CRM software helps improve communication between the marketing and sales team. That way, the team can strategize together towards a common goal. As a result, it leads to improved lead quality and reduces duplication of tasks leading to increased productivity.
Great analysis and very true, the focus of every business should be understanding the customer needs. I think a good CRM should include customer feedback metrics, which will guide the managers on decision making.